Celebrities, like spies and serial killers, constantly have to protect themselves from people trying to dig into their affairs. They're always one hacked email or leaked sex tape away from being in every late-night host's opening monologue, and that creates the type of vigilance even Batman tips his awkward rubber mask at -- most of the time, anyway.
While the media is constantly looking to catch celebs with their pants down, some of them just walk around with their tighty-whiteys around their ankles without realizing. For example ...
MySpace, much like goth haiku and urban electric jazz ballads, is something from the early 2000s that we've all decided to let go. Though, when we say "decided to let go," what we actually mean is "forgotten still exists and ohmygod I never deleted my account!" Calm down, thirty-somethings; nobody cares enough to dig up some mildly embarrassing pictures from the depths of a digital wasteland. Unless you've become an international superstar in the meanwhile. Like Tom Hardy.
That man posing for a picture like he's new to online dating is in fact tough-guy actor Tom "Did you just spill my drink" Hardy, who until 2015 had a MySpace page chock full of photos that look like they were pulled from an audition tape for Magic Mike. Here he is apparently auditioning for the porn parody of Bronson, looking less like Gotham's reckoning and more like Stoke-on-Trent's next top model.
In addition to the pictures, there were also some delightfully juvenile posts, ranging from strange emo poetry ("I am a goldfish walking through a desert") to cooking a turkey ("x I'm cooking a turkey yo x x"). Pretty embarrassing stuff -- or is it? When Hardy was confronted by his past internet sins, he proudly responded that he didn't give a fuck. Hardy declared: "In my tighty-whitey budgie smugglers. In America, they say 'you should be ashamed of this,' but I'm actually not remotely ashamed -- that is me in my natural habitat, thank you." No, thank you, sir.
The profile has since been removed, no doubt by some uptight suits, or maybe by Tom from MySpace in an act of wild jealousy, but the legend will live on. It's good to know that even the greatest of actors can start out as silly duck-faced idiots. We look forward to Zac Efron becoming the most respected actor of his generation after Twitter takes a nosedive. Speaking of Twitter ...
Much like the Coast Guard, folks in the entertainment industry get very angry about pirates. Like Kanye West, who, after the release of his latest album, The Life Of Pablo, and having a meltdown about (allegedly) being $53 million in debt, threatened to sue The Pirate Bay for costing him millions of dollars in illegal downloads. So it was kind of awkward when, a few weeks later, he posted a pic that revealed he was looking to torrent music software from the very same site.
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Kanye tweeted a picture of himself listening to Sufjan Stevens on YouTube, probably trying to figure out how other people manage to be talented without being a Sean Penn-level douchebag. Unfortunately for him, he'd forgotten he had a couple extra tabs open showing that he was using The Pirate Bay to download a music program called Serum, a digital synthesizer selling for a little under $200.
After seeing this, house music producer Deadmau5, who co-owns the software, called out Kanye, offering to set up a Kickstarter so that little Yeezy could afford whatever music software his label apparently didn't already have. Kanye didn't accept the help, as he's too proud to beg for money from regular people -- he only wants handouts from tech billionaires. Pretty bad form, especially for Kanye, who himself is a part owner of a bit of music software named Tidal, the new revolutionary music streaming service where rich musicians make money off of poor musicians. Not that he's any good at getting it to make money, though. Kanye couldn't even manage to convince his own simpleton in-laws to download the app. So, yeah, maybe he does need a five-finger discount every once in a while.
50 Cent was the hottest rapper of the Bush 2 administration, but that was a long time ago, and going by his recent financial declarations, Fiddy isn't doing great. Though that didn't stop him from throwing around money like being a playa is tax deductible, which is probably not a good idea if you're also asking the government to bail you out.
Back in 2015, about a decade after his last hit, Curtis "Get Rich Or Die Tryin'" Jackson filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, claiming a string of bad business investments (and subsequent lawsuits) had left him with less than his name's worth. This bankruptcy came after losing his lawsuit against a woman whose sex tape Fiddy had illegally obtained, narrated over it with a silly voice, and then posted on the internet. Having to pay $7 million in asshole tax, 50 Cent had to tighten his belt and claimed he didn't have the money to pay back all of his creditors. A claim that probably would have gone better if he didn't keep posting pictures of himself with piles of money everywhere. Case in point:
We're pretty sure if you can spell the word "broke" with stacks of $100 bills, you're not actually broke. There are actual banks that don't keep that much cash on hand. After his bankruptcy plea, 50 Cent started posting a string of pictures showing off his vast amount of cash lying around the house. That's because Fiddy isn't actually broke; he just has a few less millions than he's used to. His court documents state he was only worth around $16 million, a far cry from Forbes' estimate of $155 million just a few months prior. No matter the real number, according to Jackson it wasn't enough to pay back his debts, only just enough to swim around in like he's Scrooge McDuck. And he does seem to need that much cash on hand, seeing as he claims monthly living expenses of $108,000. That may seem a bit high, but his photo shoot did show that when 50 Cent fills his crisper with greens, those greens have Benjamin Franklin's face on them. And according to the Wall Street Journal, his monthly food bill is about $3,000, which means that the hundred dollar bills are actually the least expensive thing in that fridge.
When the courts asked him to explain this sudden discovery of wealth, Fiddy responded that it was all fake money. He also announced that he was "done" with Instagram, because people no longer have a sense of humor about a millionaire pretending to be broke so he can take his time paying damages to a woman whose life he ruined while all the while mocking the same legal system by flaunting huge wads of cash. We're all just a bunch of fuddy-duddies.
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When you're a celebrity, everyone wants to hitch their wagon onto yours. That's why celebs have to be extra careful handing out their contact info to any old nobody they meet out in the real word. In that sense and that sense alone, the internet has been a godsend. Now fans can be tricked into thinking they have a relationship by following their favorite celebs' assistant-managed Twitter accounts. But this social media can also backfire, like when they try to mix old technology, like phone numbers, with new, like accidentally posting said phone number on the internet.
Sometimes, it can be an innocent mistake -- like for Denise Richards, who meant to direct-message her phone number back in 2009 when most of the world was still figuring out how to use Twitter. Sometimes it's a whole lot creepier, like when reality TV's dingus Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino tweeted out his number while trying to use outdated pop lyrics to bed an internet lady. He even instructed her to not share his number. Whoops.
Not that they'll ever learn. Even in late 2015, famous model/Kanye West butt-play-shamer Amber Rose accidentally tweeted her digits to her 3 million followers, who immediately started calling her like she was a radio DJ giving out free tickets to the millionth caller. At least those people were trying to contact someone who wanted to be contacted. Charlie Sheen just randomly tweeted his phone number to Justin Bieber in 2011 -- which was probably not the first time he tried to hook up with an underage pop star. Then again, Charlie Sheen probably collects sex-offender charges like the rest of us collect Pokemon.
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Those are all examples of celebrities who are not great with technology. But even the most savvy of celebs can be caught off guard. This is what Katy Perry found out when she Instagrammed a picture of her dog and immediately got called by a bunch of frothing fans. The pup's collar had her phone number on it in case of emergencies -- a smart and responsible move that the internet was not going to let go unpunished. Perry had to remove the collar, deactivate the number, and fire the dog from her entourage.
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Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Social media has become a great way for marketing departments to trick fans into being unpaid interns, letting them constantly remind their friends and followers which superhero movie is about to hit the theaters. For actors, it's just another part of the degrading promotion tour they have to endure every time they try to make art. At least they get to sit around in their pajamas while they're tweeting. Though this may explain why they're suddenly a lot less careful about leaking spoilers.
Imagine poor Sly Stallone's horror when he discovered he'd accidentally given the internet a vital page of his script for Creed. He probably didn't think that posting a fuzzy picture of a script page upside-down would cause a fuss, which shows his age more than even Rocky IV did. In a matter of minutes, the internet had already revealed parts of Apollo Creed's son's big fight and a little bit about ancient Rocky's health (spoiler: not great).
Still, a boxing movie with half a dozen previous installments was never going to have any shocking twists in the first place. It wasn't like a Game Of Thrones script got leaked or anything. Except that that happened too. When Actor Elie Haddad signed on for the sixth season of Game Of Thrones, he clearly hadn't been briefed on how far GOT fans would go to finally get to know something before those awful book readers did. So when Haddad accidentally posted a photo that included a page of his script on his iPad, frenzied fans jumped on his Instagram feed like it contained the cure for greyscale.
Fortunately for the show, all the leaked page revealed was some brief continuation of where we left Daenerys at the end of the previous season. Which is a shame, because it would have been so much more entertaining to see the internet have an aneurysm if the page had opened with Ramsay Bolton drinking wine out of Jon Snow's bleached skull.
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Many countries give their leaders honorary military positions so that they can wear some medals and not feel like wusses attending parades. But in the United Kingdom, they've got this bad habit of letting their royals actually become soldiers. Which brings a unique set of problems with it, not the least of which is dealing with security breaches when your regiment's prince has decided to organize a photo shoot.
Both of the U.K.'s young princes have chosen military careers, probably because they already knew how good they look carrying sabers. While younger brother Prince Harry went full metal jacket and became an Apache attack helicopter commander, Prince William -- or Flight Lieutenant Wales if you're nasty -- went the humanitarian route and joined the RAF's search-and-rescue squadron. Because of this, the House of Windsor immediately wanted to brand the heir to the heir to the throne (there's a lot of waiting for old folk to die in British aristocracy) as "working royal" instead of the typical "lazy, no-good, racist, swan-eating royal" popularized in previous generations. The royal PR team decided to create a personal website witnessing the public life of the prince, or a blog to us common folk. A big part of which was capturing the prince in his uniform (which is something they never ask of Harry anymore) while he spends his days working at Royal Air Force Valley in Wales. At which point photographers started following around an Air Force officer who is around military intelligence most of his day. What could possibly go wrong?
At first look, nothing. When the pictures hit the website, they showed a boring but human routine. A prince was simply doing commoner things like getting the tea, making the beds, eating a salad, and typing top-secret passwords into a computer -- which he accidentally did while facing the camera. After closer inspection, the Ministry of Defence (Non-Dark-Arts Division) discovered that several classified usernames and passwords were indeed visible in the royal photos, but by that time a few dozen international news agencies had already used them. Unable to undo the security breach, the RAF scrubbed all the leaked intel by resetting the names and passwords. Finally, they had to amend (i.e. Photoshop) the pictures so they were yet again safe for publication.
Which left only one thing: convincing the press to switch images. And how did one of the largest military organizations in the world tell media organizations which pictures they were allowed to use? They "kindly asked" them, of course -- just in case you forgot how British this story really is.
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Isaac Cabe
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